Holcombe still stood irresolute, his porters eying him from under their burdens, and the runners from the different hotels plucking at his sleeve.

“There’s some very good people at the Albion,” urged the Police Commissioner, “and three or four of ’em’s New-Yorkers.  There’s the Morrises and Ropes, the Consul-General, and Lloyd Carroll—­”

“Lloyd Carroll!” exclaimed Holcombe.

“Yes,” said Meakim, with a smile, “he’s here.”  He looked at Holcombe curiously for a moment, and then exclaimed, with a laugh of intelligence, “Why, sure enough, you were Mr. Thatcher’s lawyer in that case, weren’t you?  It was you got him his divorce?”

Holcombe nodded.

“Carroll was the man that made it possible, wasn’t he?”

Holcombe chafed under this catechism.  “He was one of a dozen, I believe,” he said; but as he moved away he turned and asked:  “And Mrs. Thatcher.  What has become of her?”

The Police Commissioner did not answer at once, but glanced up at Holcombe from under his half-shut eyes with a look in which there was a mixture of curiosity and of amusement.  “You don’t mean to say, Mr. Holcombe,” he began, slowly, with the patronage of the older man and with a touch of remonstrance in his tone, “that you’re still with the husband in that case?”

Holcombe looked coldly over Mr. Meakim’s head.  “I have only a purely professional interest in any one of them,” he said.  “They struck me as a particularly nasty lot.  Good-morning, sir.”

“Well,” Meakim called after him, “you needn’t see nothing of them if you don’t want to.  You can get rooms to yourself.”

Holcombe did get rooms to himself, with a balcony overlooking the bay, and arranged with the proprietor of the Albion to have his dinner served at a separate table.  As others had done this before, no one regarded it as an affront upon his society, and several people in the hotel made advances to him, which he received politely but coldly.  For the first week of his visit the town interested him greatly, increasing its hold upon him unconsciously to himself.  He was restless and curious to see it all, and rushed his guide from one of the few show-places to the next with an energy which left that fat Oriental panting.

[Illustration:  Stopping for half-hours at a time before a bazaar.]

But after three days Holcombe climbed the streets more leisurely, stopping for half-hours at a time before a bazaar, or sent away his guide altogether, and stretched himself luxuriously on the broad wall of the fortifications.  The sun beat down upon him, and wrapped him into drowsiness.  From far afield came the unceasing murmur of the market-place and the bazaars, and the occasional cries of the priests from the minarets; the dark blue sea danced and flashed beyond the white margin of the town and its protecting reef of rocks where the sea-weed rose and fell, and above his head the buzzards swept heavily, and called